Amazon employees warn company’s AI ‘will do staggering damage to democracy, our jobs, and the earth’

The letter was published last week with signatures from more than 1,000 unnamed Amazon employees, from Whole Foods cashiers to IT support technicians. It’s a small portion of Amazon’s workforce, which is about 1.53 million, according to the company’s third-quarter earnings statement.

In it, employees claim the company is “abandoning its climate goals to build AI,” forcing them to use the technology while cutting back on their workforce in favor of AI investments, and helping to build “a more militarized surveillance state with fewer protections for ordinary people.”

“We, the undersigned Amazon employees, have serious concerns about this aggressive proposition during the global rise of authoritarianism and our most important years for reversing the climate crisis,” the letter’s authors wrote. “We believe that a justifiable and rapid approach to developing artificial intelligence will cause enormous harm to democracy, our jobs, and the Earth.”

The letter noted that Amazon’s global carbon emissions have increased since 2019, despite its goal of reaching zero by 2040.

Amazon said luck The claim that the company has abandoned its climate commitments is “categorically false and ignores the facts,” a statement said.

“Amazon is already committed to supporting our operations more sustainably and investing in carbon-free energy,” said Amazon spokesman Brad Glaser. “This includes supporting two advanced nuclear power agreements and investing in more than 600 renewable energy projects around the world.” luck He added in the statement that the company is working to make operations more energy efficient, including data centers.

Amazon increased its carbon emissions by 6% last year, partly due to rapid data center construction.

In November, Amazon announced a plan to invest up to $50 billion to expand artificial intelligence and supercomputing infrastructure for U.S. government customers on AWS, starting in 2026. The tech giant plans to spend nearly $150 billion on data centers over the next 15 years, according to a March 2024 Bloomberg report.

On a third-quarter earnings call, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky told analysts that the company has spent $89.9 billion so far this year, primarily on enhancing Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing business. Olsavsky added that the investment aims to support demand for artificial intelligence and core services from Amazon, as well as technical infrastructure such as data centers.

Meanwhile, Amazon announced in October that it would cut about 14,000 jobs at the company, about 4% of the company’s workforce of 350,000 people, as part of a broader restructuring based on artificial intelligence. The company cuts could total up to 30,000 jobs, which would be the company’s largest ever. ReutersIt was reported a day before Amazon’s announcement.

“What we need to remember is that the world is changing rapidly,” Beth Galletti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people and experience, wrote in the memo. “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we have seen since the Internet, and is enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before.”

Speaker Glaser noted luck Galetti’s memo in response to AI-related job cuts at the company.

Those who aren’t laid off are expected to produce more in less time, face mandates to build “wasteful” AI tools even for projects that don’t really need them, and see huge investments being funneled into AI while little is allocated to support building their careers, the employees wrote in the open letter.

The letter also warned that shifting Amazon’s Ring Doorbell camera company to AI-first and reintroducing a tool for police to request footage from its feed “would cede an incredible amount of power into the hands of an increasingly authoritarian government and a few companies willing to abandon any principles they claim to have in the race for AI dominance.”

In the letter, the signatories demand that the tech giant detail a general plan to power all data centers with renewable energy, provide a seat at the table for an organization-wide review of the use and need for AI, and pledge that the company’s AI will not be used for acts of violence, surveillance, or mass deportation.

“The Amazon employees who signed this letter believe in building a better world, not building fallback bunkers,” the authors wrote. “We want to realize the promised gains from artificial intelligence everyone More freedom to play and rest, spend time with family and friends, be affected by nature, be creative, and feel safe being who we are.